We are looking at hosting 3 globally distributed SQL Server installations at different data centers. The intent is that Site A will serve web traffic and data for a specific region, same with Site B and C. In the case that Site A data center goes down, looses connectivity, etc. the users of Site A users will fail over to Site B or C (depending which is up). Also, if a user from Site A travels to Site C they should be able to access their data as it was on Site A.

My questions is what SQL replication technology (SQL Replication or 3rd party) can support this scenario? We are using SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise at each site, each site runs on top of VMWare with a Netapp filer. Would something like distributed caching help in this scenario as well?

We have looked at and tested Peer-to-Peer replication but have encountered issues with conflicts during our testing. I imagine there are other global data centers that have encountered and solved this issue.

1 Answer
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Storage Foundation for Windows- High Availability with the Global Cluster Operation would help you do this - it is called 3-way GCO. It supports multiple versions of SQL (from 2005-2008) and multiple platforms (w2k3-w2k8 R2, 32bit-64bit).

Basically, it is a "cluster of clusters", each site can have a single-node or multiple node clusters. And the SQL data is replicated in a "consistent" manner, such that post failover SLQ can be brought up on the failed-over site.